Refinements to show up in Edge Canary soon

Jul 1, 2019 05:02 GMT  ·  By

Like many other software developers these days, Microsoft is super-committed to dark themes in its apps, including in the new Microsoft Edge browser that’s still in the works.

And because the browser is based on Chromium, any improvement that Microsoft makes for Edge can expand to the other browsers running on the same engine too, including here Google Chrome.

One of the most recent improvements proposed by Microsoft concerns the dark theme in Chromium browsers.

As discovered by Leo Varela and revealed on reddit, Microsoft wants tooltips in Edge and Google Chrome to support the dark mode as well, as they’re currently using the standard appearance with a white background.

This is only possible with aura tooltips, which are already being used in Windows 10, mostly in UWP apps and in modern parts of the operating system, such as the Start menu. Legacy components of Windows 10 don’t yet use aura tooltips, albeit they should embrace them very soon thanks to the latest API improvements in the OS.

Other tooltip changes

Microsoft explains in a commit that further changes could be required for tooltips with a dark mode, including an increase of the maximum width.

“The native Windows tooltip doesn't support dark theme and it has some accessibility issues with the text scaling settings. By using the aura tooltips we can solve both of these problems together,” Microsoft notes.

“Included in this change is an increase to the maximum width of tooltips from 400px to 800px in order to better match the native tooltip and avoid some of the early truncation issues described by [link] (which ChromeOS currently suffers from).”

The tooltip improvements should make their way to the new Microsoft Edge in the coming days as part of the Canary channel. Google Chrome could also feature the same refinement on Windows 10 in the next updates as well.